Tag Archives: Taxpayer

Your tax dollars at work.

Made in 2010 but just coming into the public eye is a Star Trek spoof video made by the IRS for a training and leadership session. At $60,000 this sad parody was supposed to share helpful information with IRS employees. Instead it’s just an embarrassment. The IRS last week apologized for the misuse of funds.
Even Captain Kirk is appalled at the waste of taxpayer money.

Team Obama sent an email to its many supporters looking for post election feedback. Pundits across the country have acknowledged this campaign was well managed and found its target groups, rallying them to vote in big numbers.

The image at right, taken from the BarackObama.com website, gives the supporter many opportunities to list with which constituency group he or she best identifies. It is interesting to note there is no entry for ‘male’ or ‘Caucasian’. Some might also wonder where the group ‘taxpayer’ is?

Was this an accidental omission or did the campaign not see those who identify themselves as males and or Caucasian as part of their target audience?

From what I can tell, these books were bought for our U.S. embassies that we have scattered across the globe. I decided to google “Do U.S. embassies have books?” in an effort to understand why we would be purchasing copies of Obama’s memoir for them. It turns out that we have libraries in some of these things (embassies). Below is a picture of what I found on one of the embassies in India’s website.

So it turns out that we have books (and libraries) in our embassies across the world. As I thought of this, I had a somewhat evil idea cross my mind. See… there are nearly 7 billion people on earth, and only 300 million of them are from the United States. The rest (over 6 billion) are from various nations and continents. And as crazy as it might sound, a lot of people on this earth don’t have the greatest appreciation for the United States, Anglo-Saxons, or anything that looks like colonialism. As it turns out, they do, however, have an appreciation for an American President (with a Kenyan father) who grew up in Indonesia.

It crossed my mind that Obama’s book, “Dreams of My Father”, might actually be a brilliant marketing tool to have in our embassies. And… it can even have a “Walt Disney effect”. When you go to Disney Land, you can go to the gift store and (I assume) find a book that details how awesome Disney was, and it gives you a reason to feel like his amusement park was a good thing. So… I imagine it helps us to have books in our embassies that feature a guy who doesn’t even seem to like America as our president. Obama’s life story and his disposition towards America send a subliminal message to other countries. I’m not sure that it’s one that *I* particularly appreciate, but it’s one that might resonate with young people in other parts of the world. Basically, his book (which really “seems” to hate white people) might ultimately do us a favor in some of our foreign embassies. I could be wrong, but it seems like having these books at American embassies might actually help us.

So before we decry the spending of $70,000 (of our hard earned tax money) on some crappy books, we should ask ourselves… “Could this actually help us in the long run? Could it be useful to have foreigners read a book that illustrates how an ‘America-hater’ became the leader of the greatest country on earth?”.

What do you guys think? Is $70,000 even enough money to worry about? Or is it absolutely absurd that tax money should be used to purchase books written by our president? Or… is this much to do about nothing? Let us know in the comments below. Or you can tell us on Facebook. We’re pretty flexible like that.